Wall Street’s many campaign donors are lining up behind Joe Biden, not the incumbent President of the United States, according to the New York Times.
Under the August 9 headline, “The Wallets of Wall Street Are With Joe Biden, if Not the Hearts,” three reporters wrote:
While Wall Street financiers tend to be more socially liberal, they have collectively swung back and forth between parties. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics show the securities and investment community donating more to President George W. Bush in 2004, and then to Mr. Obama in 2008, and then to Mitt Romney in 2012, followed by Mrs. Clinton in 2016, than to their respective presidential rivals.
This year, it’s Mr. Biden. Financial industry cash flowing to Mr. Biden and outside groups supporting him shows him dramatically out-raising the president, with $44 million compared with Mr. Trump’s $9 million.
The donors are already pressuring Biden to pick a business-friendly candidate for vice president, and Biden is signaling a hands-off policy toward Wall Street:
In recent meetings with donors, Mr. Biden has said that while the wealthy are going to have to “do more,” the details of his tax hikes are still being hammered out … in July, the candidate spoke of the need for corporate America to “change its ways.” But the solution, he said, would not be legislative.
“I love Bernie, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I don’t think 500 billionaires are the reason why we’re in trouble,” Biden said in 2018.
Notably, the article did not mention one of Wall Street’s greatest heartburns with Trump — his on-again, off-again popular push to reduce the immigration inflow of foreign workers, consumers, and real estate customers.
Trump’s popular lower-immigration promise could reduce the federal government’s policy of annually inflating the new labor supply by roughly 20 percent. If implemented, it would force CEOs to pay higher wages and would pressure investors to transfer some of their new investments from the coastal states to the heartland states.
In the last few months, Trump has zig-zagged on his low-immigration promises as his poll ratings stay under Joe Biden’s numbers. But on June 22, Trump blocked several visa worker pipelines and promised regulations to ensure that CEOs are forced to hire Americans first.
In contrast, Biden has promised to open the door for new wages of blue-collar migrants from Central American and white-collar migrants from India, China, and elsewhere.
Those policies are catnip for Biden’s supporters in the technology sector, including former Google chief Eric Schmidt, who is urging the federal government to let companies hire more of their professional workforce from overseas.
Wall Streeters’ resentment towards Trump was noted in one quote from a former Goldman Sach’s investor, James Atwood: “For people who are in the business of hiring and firing C.E.O.s, Donald Trump should have been fired a while ago.”
However, Trump can only be hired or fired by the voters.